


Stories of the Village Under the Sea

by yeou_bi



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Bullying, Childhood Friends, Fights, High School, Homophobia, M/M, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 11:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30105540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeou_bi/pseuds/yeou_bi
Summary: Life is no fairytale. Not every road leads you somewhere. Not every story has a happy ending.Children are allowed to dream but adults have to wake up to face life in all its ugliness.So what about all the young people stuck in-between?When do they have to stop dreaming?Kim Minseok is a dreamer.Park Chanyeol is a troublemaker.They meet again in high school but life has changed since their childhood.
Relationships: Kim Minseok | Xiumin/Park Chanyeol
Kudos: 3





	Stories of the Village Under the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this outside AO3 as a multi-chaptered fic in 2014, so if it feels familiar, that's probably why. 
> 
> It's practically a piece of history by now, so I decided to preserve all spelling and grammar mistakes. :D (What's a comma?)

## Foreshadow

Kim Minseok was a dreamer. Ever since they were children he liked to make up stories about magical creatures and heroes and wondrous places. His favourite stories were about the inhabitants of the village under the sea.

  
"A long, long time ago, there was a village near the sea full of lazy people. They were so lazy, they waited with buckets at the beaches for the fish to jump in," he would say and they would all listen, even his older brother, who pretended to to his math homework, and Chanyeol's sister, who made nasty comments but was always the first to get excited.

"Didn't they starve then?" Chanyeol's sister asked and feigned a yawn.

"They almost did," Minseok would say. "But they were all so lazy, they didn't even know they were starving. They just sat in their houses and looked at their walls and out of their windows.  
"Then, one day, they heard the sirens. 'Run away!' the people in the other villages yelled. 'Run or you will all die!'"

"How did they even hear the people from other villages?" Chanyeol's sister asked and Chanyeol punched her arm.

"But the people were so lazy, they didn't move," Minseok would continue. "They lay in their beds and sat in their armchairs and outside they saw the sky getting darker. A big wave was coming closer, and closer..." He used his hand to mimick the movement. His arm rose far above their heads. "It covered the sun and the beach and WHAM!" He jumped up and loudly clapped his hands, causing his little sister to shriek. "The village disappeared under the big wave and all the villagers were eaten by the sea."

"Oh god," Chanyeol's sister would gasp and even Minseok's brother would forget to finish his homework. They all held their breath.

"But they didn't die," Minseok would say in a grave voice. "They were so lazy, they just kept living under the sea. They floated in their houses, and fish swam around them. Octopuses slept in their beds and corals grew in their shoes, but the villagers just sighed and asked, 'Why is life so boring?'"

  
Reality didn't seem to exist in Kim Minseok's world. Stories were the only things that mattered to him, and without them he seemed unable to live.

But they all had to grow up eventually and reality caught up with them.

First it was time that divided them.

Then it was war.

.

.

.

  
It sounded like waves, like a monotonous unforgiving noise. Chanyeol couldn't even tell how many shouting students surrounded them. They were trapped in a wavering circle within an ocean of black school uniforms.

"Hit him!" they yelled.

"Show him!" he heard.

"Don't let him live!" someone shouted.

"Fight! Fight! Fight!"

They were pawns in a feud that had gone overboard. It was like a wildfire that had spread over the whole school. All the stress, all the agitation, all the worries about whether they would be able to satisfy the expectations of their parents and their teachers and all the other adults around them, it had all escalated into this one moment in which old friendships meant nothing.

"Hyung, I'm really sorry about this," he muttered, as he grabbed Minseok's collar and lifted him up. It was going to be the last hit. His fists were shaking, he felt his blood rushing through his veins, his vision was blurred, his mind felt numb. Just one last hit, and it would be over. One last hit, and maybe...  
Maybe he could make it right afterwards.  
But he couldn't stop now.

Minseok frantically held onto his arm, his fingers dug into his sleeve.  
They were like wild animals, reduced to basic instincts. Survival was all that mattered and there was no way out, not until one of them gave up.

Endless moments had passed since he and his group had entered Minseok' classroom. He wasn't their main target, but he was the only one around. It was bad luck.

Chanyeol never wanted it to be like this, but this wasn't about him or about Minseok. They were chess pieces, not more, they couldn't have an own will, and he thought that if he was the one to hit him, he could at least make sure that it wouldn't hurt too much. It was all he could do.

Just one last hit.

One last hit to win the fight.

## Two Families

The Kims and the Parks became neighbours when their children were so young, they immediately forgot what it was like to live without the respective other family.  
Minkyoo, the oldest of the Kim Family, had vague memories of the empty new house and of meeting the neighbour's girl with her messy ponytail and her brother, who cried in his mother's arms. But Minkyoo, too, couldn't remember life without the Park siblings, although he knew that there must have been such a time. To him his next youngest sibling wasn't his brother Minseok, who was two years younger, but Park Chanok, the girl in-between. His youngest sibling was Park Chanyeol, who was born in the same year as Minkyung, but a few months afterwards.

It really was a lucky coincidence that the Kims and the Parks would move in next to each other, because their children were of such similar ages. When they were too small to look out for themselves, they would all spent their time in one of the families' houses. Minkyoo's mother was usually home, but if she was busy, Chanok's grandmother would visit them and they would sneak out to play in the nearby park once she had fallen asleep.

As children their life was easy and happy and full of stories. A table and a blanket turned into a cave, a bench in the park was a fortress. The beautiful queen was always Chanok, the tomboyish princess was Minkyung. Minkyoo was the wise king, Chanyeol the knight or sometimes the villain, and Minseok told them where they were and what they saw. His words became realities and it secretly amazed Minkyoo how it always felt as if he could smell and touch the worlds Minseok created. Even as an adult Minkyoo sometimes lay in bed and felt as if he was floating. The dark became the sea the village had dropped into and the shadows became the fish and the seaweed around him. He could taste the salt, felt the current, and he of course wouldn't have told anyone about it, but sometimes he suddenly felt a pang of fear, as if the Great Shark was somewhere around him.

But they couldn't be children forever and life went on in its endless cruelty.  
The first among them who became a babysitter was Minkyoo when he entered middle school, and he hated it. He wanted to spend time with his friends, but instead he was stuck with Chanok, who suddenly changed her name and didn't respect him the least, Minseok, the airhead, and the two little ones, who constantly argued. Minkyung was born in January, so she entered school a year earlier than Chanyeol who was born in November, and felt that she now had the right to lecture him. To Minkyoo, still a child himself, it just was too much.

A year later, when Chanok, or Yura as she now called herself, was supposed to take some responsibilities off him, it just became worse. She always left him behind and he probably took it out on the younger ones much too often. Afterwards he knew that he should have treasured the time he could spend with them, but puberty turned him blind and maybe a little unfair. When another year went by, Minkyoo, like Yura, ran away. Minseok was his real brother and he always listened well, so it wasn't hard to let him take charge of the two young ones. Minkyoo had to study and he had a social life, so he couldn't waste even more of his time, especially if someone like Yura could easily ditch her own brother without any consequences.

Later he regretted it, because it was then that everything fell apart. He lost sight of them, and he only really woke up when he was already in his second year of university.

  
Minseok had never been a particularly good student, no matter how vivid his imagination was, so, unlike Minkyoo and Yura, he didn't even make it into a good high school. Minkyoo of course tried to push him, but Minseok just wouldn't listen, and he gave up. The irony was that Yura made fun of Minkyoo and his stupid brother, but that her own brother eventually entered the same mediocre school.  
To Minkyoo it was enough. He couldn't force Minseok to do what he wasn't capable of, and it was already weirdly satisfying to know that Minseok at least had something in his brain, even if it didn't aid him in getting good grades. Unlike Chanyeol he at least was neither stupid nor violent.

But then one day, when Minkyoo came home late from his part time job in the barbecue restaurant, he suddenly realized that he maybe should have tried harder at being a good brother.  
The uneven road to their house was illuminated in a weak orange. They lived on a small hill, so Minkyoo had made it a habit to always watch the pavement right in front of him to make sure that he wouldnt stumble. He felt tired and beaten, and he only noticed the similarly tired and beaten figure in front of him when he was almost home. Minseok was way too late for a boy his age.  
But something was odd, and Minkyoo didn't immediately call him out on it. It was maybe his hunched back or the limp. Maybe it was the fact that he still wore his black school uniform or that Minkyoo wasn't really used to Minseok doing anything unusual. He was always home in time, always obedient, always inconspicious. It frankly unsettled him a little.

Minseok reached their front gate, and Minkyoo thought of running up to him, when their neighbour's door was thrown open and when Chanyeol appeared behind it, also still in his school uniform.  
"Hyung," he exclaimed, but didn't fully leave the house, as if he was too afraid to get too close. "Where the hell did you go? You can't just-. I mean, I spent hours looking for you."

"Sorry," Minseok muttered and fumbled with the door's lock. His face was slightly illuminated and to Minkyoo it looked as if his eye was swollen.

"Listen," Chanyeol said and scratched his neck as he slowly walked outside. His nose was covered in a bandage. "I didn't mean to... I mean, I never planned for that to happen. But I thought that if..."

"It's all right," Minseok shrugged as he faced the door, but didn't open it. "I'm fine."

"You sure?" Chanyeol asked, as he finally walked all the way up to him and bent down a little to take a better look at his face. "Your eye doesn't look all right," he said with a pained expression.

"I've seen worse. Or rather," Minseok said and his expression softened a little. "I haven't seen worse. Remember that time when Yura-noona hit me with your grandmother's pillow?"  
Minkyoo remembered. Back then they were reenacting a battle scene they had seen in a costume drama. Yura was particularly vicious and used her grandmother's bean pillow as a weapon. As a result Minseok had two swollen eyes, thanks to which he couldn't really see much for a few days.

"Oh. Yeah. I do," Chanyeol said and looked even more sorry than before. "I hope you don't think that my family wants to turn you blind or anything."

"Well, that thought did occur to me," Minseok laughed, and Chanyeol smiled vaguely, only to then shift back into worry and guiltiness.

"I'm really sorry," Chanyeol said and awkwardly lifted his hand to touch the skin around Minseok's eye. Minseok winced a little, but didn't attempt to squirm free.

"I don't blame you," he said.  
And Minkyoo knew that he had to do something. He felt like a voyeur in front of his own house, and no matter what had happened between his brother and his neighbour, to Minkyoo it just didn't seem normal or healthy, especially not if Chanyeol was the one who hurt Minseok.

"What are you two doing outside?" he said in a carefree voice, to not sound as if he had watched them like a creep, and it was almost comical how Chanyeol immediately jumped. "What's wrong with your face?" he asked his brother. Chanyeol had always been a bit of a rowdy, so it wasn't too unusual for him to have a broken nose.

"Minkyoo-hyung," Chanyeol blurted out. "This is all my fault. Today in school there was-."

"Today in school I fell down the stairs," Minseok interrupted him, and it obviously was a lie because Chanyeol looked quite taken aback at his words.

It was probably then that Minkyoo should have done something. He should have questioned him, should have asked why Chanyeol, too, was hurt then or why Minseok came home only now. He should have acted like a proper older brother.  
Instead he said, "Oh, really? You should be more careful," and walked inside.

Kim Minkyoo had failed. He, the oldest child among the two families, felt like a stranger among his siblings.

## Queen Yura

"Noona," he yelled across the street and she tried to ignore him. His school uniform was wrinkled again, the shirt's colour was closer to yellow than to white and the bandage across his nose made him look like a criminal. Her brother could look nice if he wanted to, but he rarely did. "Chanok-noona!"  
She stopped. There was no choice.

"Stop calling me that," she hissed as he caught up to her, and he dared to laugh.  
"Why?" he asked cheerfully. "It's your name." At least he was by himself and not in the company of his dubious high school friends. Chanyeol had turned into a delinquent at a school for no-goods and was drifting further and further from the image of the perfect little brother she used to have. As a child he was adorable, by now he just constantly embarrassed her.

"Why?" she scoffed. "Why, you ask? Because we're in public, and I don't want you to call me by a name that makes me sound like a 90-year-old lady."

He frowned at her and looked around. "This is our neighbourhood though. I'm pretty sure most people here know your name, noona," he said with an amused expression. "Honestly, I don't get you sometimes." He walked on and didn't even turn around, as if he expected her to come after him. If there had been any different road, she would have taken it. She even considered to go somewhere else entirely, but she needed to get into her room to change, so she sighed and followed him, always a few steps behind, in case someone watched them.

  
'Park Chanok' was her birth name. It was written in every single official document and all her family members used it.  
'Park Chanok' was the name she hated the most in the world, and it had nothing to do with vanity.

As Park Yura she currently tried to become successful as a fashion model. About a year ago, when she still was in high school, she was scouted and her agent, too, had told her that her real name was much too old-fashioned. No one younger than fifty had a name like 'Chanok', so she had appeared as 'Yura' in a couple of magazines and in small fashion shows.  
But the name change had nothing to do with that. For years now she had told everyone to call her 'Yura', because she was sick of 'Park Chanok'. She was sick of being treated as the cheap substitute for someone else.

Before she turned ten she never really understood her grandfather. She thought he was funny, and when he called her 'noona' or kept buying her dried persimmons, no matter how often she told him that she didn't like sweet things, she just assumed that he had lost his mind because he was old. She even liked her name, although her classmates made fun of her, simply because it was a name her grandfather had chosen for her.  
She couldn't possibly have known that it was never about her.

Park Chanok was her grandfather's older sister. She loved persimmons and sweetened rice. She died in war.  
Everyone knew that her grandfather began to confuse his sister and his granddaughter at some point, but no one ever bothered to do anything about it.  
"Just leave him be, Chanok," her mother would say. "It's hard enough for him."  
No one cared what it was like for her, at least not in her own family.

  
'Yura' was the invention of little Minseok, although everyone but her seemed to have forgotten about it. He came up with it when his mother was on a trip with her friends and when the two younger Kim siblings had spent the weekend with Chanok, Chanyeol and their grandparents. Chanok was eleven then, Minseok ten and Chanyeol and Minkyung eight. Where Minkyoo was she couldn't really remember, but at that point he had already acted too high and mighty for her liking, so she was happy whenever he wasn't around.

"Chanok-noona, do you want sweetened rice?" her grandfather had asked, and Chanyeol, insensible as he was, had laughed. Minseok and Minkyung had looked at her curiously, and she had hurriedly explained the story of the original Park Chanok, mainly to make sure that Minkyung, who apparently carried her heart on her sleeve, wouldn't try to enlighten her grandfather.  
Minkyung had immediately pitied the nice old man with the dead sister and had been particulary nice to him afterwards, Minseok had just looked impassive and Chanok hadn't thought that he cared. It had always been hard to tell what might have gone through his head.

But then, when they played another game of pretend, he had suddenly decided to rename them all.  
"Noona, you're Queen Yura now," he had said matter-of-factly. Minseok's instruction always had to be obeyed, because he was the one with the best ideas. Even his stubborn brother had admitted that before.

Yura had always loved his stories and she liked the new name, but she had still frowned. "Why can't I keep my name?" she had asked and he had shrugged.  
"You're the queen and Yura sounds better for a queen."

She didn't know if he did it on purpose, or whether he really grasped how much a new identity meant to her. She couldn't even tell whether he even remembered that he was the one who gave her the name, but it was a fact that he was the first among the Kim siblings who called her 'Yura' even outside their roleplays, and in the end it was him who understood her better than anyone in her real family.

To her Minseok always was the one she felt closest to among them all, her own family included, maybe because they were only a year apart. Minkyoo was arrogant and treated her like she was below him, Chanyeol constantly grew brattier and Minkyung was adorable, but childish. If she could have chosen anyone as her sibling, she would have taken Minseok, and even when they all slowly grew apart and when she was eventually stuck with Chanyeol, she never stopped wondering what it would have been liked, had they been exchanged. It had maybe changed her whole idea of what family life meant. Maybe she wouldn't be so desperate to stand on her own two feet, just so that she could get away from those people who didn't allow her to be herself.

But Minseok wasn't her brother, he was just a stranger and a no-good like Chanyeol. He, too, would have dragged her down eventually with his complete lack of ambition.

  
When Chanyeol suddenly walked faster as he got closer to their house, Yura thought that he just wanted to shake her off. When he then walked past the house, and rang at the Kims' door, she frowned. It had been years now since they all stopped being close. Minkyung attended a different high school and was in a higher grade, and although Chanyeol and Minseok apparently went to the same school for hopeless cases, did they not really have much reason to hang out. An age gap of two years did make a difference for students after all.

"Okay, hyung, listen, I went to this place for traditional medicine today," Chanyeol immediately said when Minseok opened the door, and shoved a small container at him he pulled out of his backpack. "And the woman there told me that this helps with swellings. I have no idea what's in it, but - you don't have any allergies, do you? - I'm sure it helps. Is your leg okay by the way? She says she needs to have a look at it before she can prescribe something."

Minseok looked incredibly confused and just blinked. "My leg is fine," he said and looked at the thing in his hands.

"I saw you limping though," Chanyeol said doubtfully, and frowned at Minseok's awkward one-legged standing position.

"It hurts a little when I put my weight on it," Minseok said after a pause, and when Chanyeol's face changed into an apologetic expression, he hurriedly added, "But not much, don't worry. It's fine."

Chanyeol still didn't look too convinced, and Minseok seemed a little helpless, when he noticed Yura staring at them.  
"Yura-noona," he said, and gave her a small bow.

"Hi," she said with a small wave of her hand. "Long time no see. How is Minkyung?"

"Fine, I guess," he shrugged.

"I see. Have you eaten?"

"I'm about to."

"I see."

It was sad how their conversations had been reduced to small talk like that, and for a second she felt almost jealous of Chanyeol, who looked as if he was about to invite himself to eat Minseok's mother's home-made cooking. It was as if there was a wall between them. She was the outsider, Chanyeol stood on the other side.  
She was closer in age to Minseok than he was, but she was that old noona now who had to enter her own house, while her younger brother talked with an old childhood friend.  
She didn't know why Minseok would be hurt, and for a second it made her feel sad. He had given her a new name, but life had changed so much since then that only the name remained, not its origin.  
There was no Queen Yura, just Park Yura, the newcomer model who needed an alias because her real name was too old-fashioned. She was in no position to choose her sibling, because all the candidates had run off and spent time together instead.

But Park Yura didn't need any family. Park Yura would follow her own path.

## The Impoverished Merchant

Boksan High School was a public school, so it welcomed every student who had no chances at 'proper' schools. Although there were many reasons for students to end up there, all of which came in various layers, did almost all of them boil down to simple things such as stupidity, delinquency and poverty.

Kim Joonmyun grew up in a world where money could solve all his problems, and although he was fairly sure that he could pass any entrance exam with his brainpower alone, did he always feel comforted by the knowledge that there always was a way. He never had to fight for anything, neither with his fists nor his intellect, and he had been a student of one of the most prestigious high schools in town. The world was his oyster. Was, until he learned the meaning of the word 'bankruptcy'.

He didn't know when his father's business had failed, because it had been hidden from him until people came into his house to take everything that was of any worth. It was as if they had accidentally become the heroes in their own soap opera. His mother cried when they took her jewels, his father desperatedly drank his favourite prized vintage wine, and Joonmyun stood in front of an empty road called 'future', with no certain destination.

  
He knew Boksan High School. It was rather infamous even among students of better schools, so when he was told he would have to go there, he of course complained.  
"Aren't there other schools? There have to be thousands of poor people, so I'm sure there are enough other schools for them," he had tried to argue.  
"We're worse than poor people right now," his mother had said coldly, as if it was below her to deal with her child's problems. "We're ruined and in debt. You should be thankful that you're allowed to enter any school at all. There are boys your age who earn their own money."

Joonmyun wasn't stupid. Joonmyun wasn't violent. But Joonmyun was poor now, and it took him a while before that realization fully struck him.

  
"What's wrong with the first graders though?" someone asked as they sat behind the school. Technically they didn't have to hide to smoke, no teacher ever bothered them about simple delicts like that, but there probably still was a certain thrill about things done in secret. "Back when I was that age I didn't dare to speak a word around older guys, but those little shits constantly pick fights. They might as well sign their own death certificates if they even pick on the Core."

Fights belonged so much into the daily routine of Boksan High School, its students sometimes seemed to forget that people outside the school grounds did in fact not settle all their disputes through violence. Only deliberately inconspicious people like Joonmyun could live in relative peace. His 'friends' were wannabe delinquents, secret smokers, people 'without guts', who were probably closer to normal than everyone else. They were like satellites surrounding 'the Core', those infamous leaders of the third grade who had fought their way to the top.

"Honestly, it freaks me out how shameless they are," someone else said and angrily attempted to light his cigarette with an almost empty lighter. "What if I'm the next Kim Minseok?"

"Why would they waste their time on you?" someone scoffed. "You're just some weak nobody."

They laughed and made jokes about it, but the images still haunted them. The attack on Kim Minseok a few days ago was to prove an example, to show that the first graders had the power to bring them all down. It was a cheap attempt, an unfair fight. And it had worked.

  
Joonmyun was in the classroom next door when a mass of black uniforms passed by the window. They made barely a noise, like a group of grim monks, and only the shuffling of their feet could be heard in the corridor. Their destination was the classroom of the main leaders of the Core. It probaly wasn't about anyone in particular.

There was a ghostly silence, and then the roars started. Someone hectically ran by the classroom and the black mass followed him.

Kim Minseok was the first victim. They chased him through the school until they cornered him on the schoolyard. There were dozens of them, dozens to make sure that he couldn't get away, and one who hit him. But the number of the first graders was laughable in comparison to the hundreds of students who watched the fight. They cheered and yelled from their classroom windows, as if the scene in the yard was just a sports events. What ultimately terrified Joonmyun the most probably was how no one seemed to care about a single student getting hurt.

Kim Minseok wasn't a bad guy, he wasn't a bully or a fighter. To Joonmyun he actually seemed more like a direct victim of the Core, like someone they allowed around without giving him any rights. It wouldn't have surprised them to hear that they took his money and made him do their homework. Kim Minseok's only mistake was that he belonged to the Core. For that he got punished, simply because he attended a school where scars counted as achievements.  
It made Joonmyun sick, and it was only the terror that prevented him from averting his eyes. Endless moments seemed to go by, until he finally heard the familiar voice of the Core's main leader outside his classroom.

"What the hell is going on?" Wu Yifan asked as he walked along the corridor and all the third graders who had aimlessly stood around the windows immediately grew silent. "What's with the commotion?"

"It's the first graders," someone said in panic. "They have Minseok."  
And those simple words immediately changed the situation.  
The Core finally moved. They ran through the hallways, broke up the circle on the yard and caused it to scatter into a mess of black uniforms. It looked almost comical, like a fight between ants.

And Joonmyun hated it. He wasn't violent, he wasn't stupid, but his poverty had caused him to become involved with high school students who wasted their time on fighting each other, rather than to fight the society around them, as if they didn't understand that they would have to move on once they finished high school.  
There was less than a year left for the Core in grade three, less than three for grade one, and yet they blindly acted like warriors in a fight that wouldn't earn them anything but the 'respect' of other delinquents.

He didn't understand it.  
He didn't want to understand it.  
And he knew that if he wasn't careful, he could easily become a victim like Kim Minseok, the beaten boy who was dragged away by his Core friends, and who had not actually done anything wrong.

## The Upside-Down Umbrella

To call it rain was almost too nice. Drops fell from the sky like heavy weights that exploded on rooftops and streets and people's heads. It was afternoon but dark clouds blocked the tiniest ray of sun, and as Baekhyun stood in the entrance hall he honestly wondered whether it wouldn't have been better to stay in school for a few more hours, at least until the rain stopped. He did bring an umbrella, but his shoes and pants would get wet anyway, and there were few things on earth he hated more than soaking wet shoes.

"Well, damn," Chanyeol next to him said and pulled a face at the sky. Chanyeol was the type who rarely thought ahead, so although the news about the rain had been all over the weather forecasts, did it probably catch him by surprise. There was a time when Chanyeol forgot his complete backpack for school and only realized it when he entered the classroom, so it was rather unlikely that he even owned an umbrella. "Mind walking with me to the bus stop?" he asked and nodded towards Baekhyun's yellow umbrella.

"I do mind, actually," Baekhyun said. "I don't share my umbrella with guys."

Chanyeol squinted his eyes. "What the hell?" he asked. "I'm not asking you to share your life with me, Baekhyun-ah, just that wonderful invention that keeps my head dry." He threw up his hands in exasperation. "And anyway," he began, but immediately stopped when two other figures appeared in the hallway.

"You didn't bring an umbrella?" Luhan, one of the Core leaders, asked as he put on his shoes. Unlike Minseok, who was with him, he didn't seem to take any notice of Baekhyun and Chanyeol. "Let's share mine then."

"It's fine," Minseok said with a short side glance at Chanyeol. "I'll just wait until the rain lets down."

"Are you stupid?" Luhan snorted. "The rain is only going to get worse, so unless you absolutely want to spent the night in school, I'd suggest that you use this one chance I offer." He didn't even wait for an answer and just pushed Minseok towards the door. "We live in the same direction anyway."

Baekhyun sighed and looked at the wet world outside, and then back at his dry shoes. He usually would have argued against anything said by anyone from grade three, but it really did seem as if the rain was only growing worse.  
Another thing that bothered him was how easily Luhan shared his things, as if he wanted to show Baekhyun how small and insignificant he was. Umbrellas were only shared by lovers and family, or so Baekhun had always believed, but he didn't really want to lose to one of his enemies. He was about to suggest to leave together, but Chanyeol seemed too distracted by the two figures who left in the rain.

"That guy really pisses me off," Chanyeol said, and before Baekhyun had a chance to ask who exactly he meant, he already stormed outside.

  
Minseok was the victim of their rally a few days ago. Chanyeol was the one who punched him in the face. Luhan was the one who broke Chanyeol's nose in return. Minseok and Luhan were friends, Chanyeol was their opponent.  
But it wasn't that easy and Baekhyun was the only outsider who knew.

Baekhyun became friends with Chanyeol in primary school and since then they had almost always been in the same class, so he had met the Kim siblings and Chanyeol's sister a couple of times before. As children the Kims and the Parks had always walked home in a pulp, lead by the eldest, but with time their group shrank. It was until Chanyeol entered his sixth grade in primary school as the only one left among them who was not in middle school yet, that 'Minseok-hyung' always fetched him and his sister Minkyung. After that there was no mention of any of them but the infamous Park Chanok any longer, and Baekhyun forgot.

Middle school changed everything. Neither Chanyeol nor him were smart or ambitious enough for a really good school, and their families just somehow gave up, as if their middle school already casted a shadow over their whole future. Baekhyun wasn't really sure what came first, his parents' disappointment or his constant failures, but after a while he was caught in a vicious circle.  
In middle school his biggest aim was to become stronger, to earn more respect, to climb the top. He woke up a little when he entered Boksan High School, because he now not only was at the bottom again, not even his teachers had any faith any longer. No one expected anything from students who entered a high school for the damned. Violence was all that mattered, and as two of the previous leaders of their old school he and Chanyeol joined the group of alienated first graders who wanted to take the shortcut. They attacked the Core, those third graders who had already earned the highest honours.

He always thought that he was the one who struggled the most. To Chanyeol there didn't seem to be a limit, because he didn't really bother about things such as loyalty. He didn't care if others got hurt, because to him the blame always had to be put on the one who was too weak to defend himself. Chanyeol in middle school turned into the devil, or so Baekhyun sometimes thought. He wasn't a completely unpleasant person to hang around with, but he was single-minded and ruthless.

Baekhyun was sure that Chanyeol in high school would only grow worse, but then something unexpected happened. 'Minseok-hyung' came back into his life.

Minseok was part of those people they were trying to bring down, and it just became much too complicated. They greeted each other in the hallway at first, and Chanyeol told everyone that Kim Minseok was his neighbour, but no one was happy to hear that he was acquainted with someone belonging to the Core, even less when he refused to attack him on his way home.  
"Are you crazy?" he would say jokingly. "His mother would kill me."  
And afterwards they just became strangers in school. Baekhyun sometimes saw them together on their way home, but officially they ignored each other, as if they only saw each other as people on opposing ends who had no open disputes.

The rally disrupted that peace.  
The plan wasn't specifically to hurt Kim Minseok, but to go to the room of class 3-1 and to pick a fight with whoever they found. It was spontaneous and mindless, and the first one to get excited was Chanyeol. He probably didn't know whose classroom it was, and when they only found Minseok, he instantly hesitated.

Chanyeol slowly followed behind like a ghost when the others raced Minseok through school. He did nothing, he just watched, and he looked almost relieved when Minseok managed to slow the group down by overturning a bucket with water students of the second grade used to clean the hallway. Minseok seemed to get away, but then he tripped when he jumped down a flight of stairs. He tried to get up, but someone had already caught up to him and kicked him down. It was then that Chanyeol suddenly pushed himself through the crowd, shoved away the other student and pulled Minseok up.  
It was awkward, and he only seemed to realize what he was doing when Minseok warily looked at the others and then back at him, as if he didn't understand the rules of the game any longer. Chanyeol had no choice. He had to fight if he didn't want to lose his position.

Chanyeol dragged Minseok out into the yard. He kicked him and hit him, but Baekhyun knew that it was not more than an empty show. Chanyeol had genuinely threatened to break Baekhyun's arm over a sandwich before, and had slapped him so hard with a book, part of his front tooth broke off. They were friends, but Chanyeol had a tendency to be overly violent.  
And yet he put the fight with Minseok out in the open, as if he wanted to be caught. Each of his punches looked weak and fake, like those of a bad pro-wrestler.

The only reason why Chanyeol hurt Minseok at all was that someone pushed him when the Core attacked. Baekhyun knew that Minseok's black eye was not more than a stupid accident. He was close enough to hear Chanyeol when he mumbled, "Oh, shit. I'm so sorry."

Luhan of course didn't know that, so he hit Chanyeol before Minseok intervened. Minseok pulled them apart, Chanyeol looked sorry, and it was oddly Luhan who reacted in a way that was not nonsensical when he attempted to take revenge for one of his friends.

  
Minseok made Chanyeol act strange. That was a fact. Chanyeol wouldn't have held a grudge for something like a broken nose. Pain was like an inevitable thing to him, and although he did whine about it every now and then, would he not have told his opponents about it.  
So when Chanyeol ran through the rain and after the two under the umbrella, it obviously wasn't just because Luhan had hit him.

Chanyeol jumped and kicked Luhan's back, causing him to stumble and to drop the umbrella. It almost looked like a cheap rain scene in a movie about delinquents, the way Chanyeol attacked Luhan like a maniac. The backpacks fell on the wet street, the umbrella was upside down. Luhan tried to get Chanyeol off himself, to no avail. Chanyeol was tall and heavy and brainlessly aggressive.  
Baekhyun sighed, because he probably had to help. As stupid as Chanyeol reacted, Baekhyun was part of the fight. He knew it was personal, but it was his duty as part of his group to help when a friend was in need.  
He was about to step out of the building, when Minseok already stopped the issue from deteriorating.

Minseok grabbed Chanyeol's back and hauled him up. Chanyeol threw around his arms in surprise, and landed on the ground, when Minseok let go. Minseok seemed to say something, and Chanyeol looked up at him with an oddly defeated expression, as if he knew that he had already lost. Minseok took the umbrella and Luhan's backpack, and helped him up while making it a point to stand between him and Chanyeol.

It was laughable.  
Minseok shoved Luhan away and they left, but Chanyeol didn't get up. He was soaking wet and sat in the rain like a child, until Baekhyun walked out and frowned at him.  
"I guess you lost," Baekhyun said and Chanyeol gave him a weak smile.

"I don't think my phone is waterproof," Chanyeol said and took out his phone from his backpocket to inspect it, despite the downpour around him. Baekhyun held out his hand to help him up, and snorted, "You probably should have thought about that before you decided to dropkick Luhan in the rain."

"Yeah, well," Chanyeol shrugged, as he took the offered hand. "It would have got wet anyway. I didn't bring an umbrella."

"Right," Baekhyun said. "Why didn't you just steal his?"

"Didn't think about it," Chanyeol said as he picked up his backpack, and Baekhyun knew that he didn't.  
It wasn't about Luhan or revenge or the rain or the umbrella.  
It was all just about Kim Minseok.

## Swimming Noses

"Do you know why people under the sea don't fight?" Minseok asked and stared at his hand holding his chopsticks. They hovered over his rice bowl, as if he couldn't decide whether he wanted to eat or not.  
  
"Is this one of your stories again?" his mother smiled as she put another side dish on the table. "What was is again? The City Underwater? Aren't you too old for that, dear?" She had never taken him very serious. Her son was like an alien to her, a useless dreamer. If it was Minseok, she didn't carry any expectations, as if it was normal that there would always be that one sibling who stuck out. To her it was enough that her two other children were smart and diligent students. She never bothered, so she didn't know that Minseok's stories were just a way for him to voice his thoughts. She didn't know that the story wasn't meant for them, but for the intruder at their dinner table.  
  
"They're lazy," Minkyung said and looked at her brother. "Isn't that why they don't fight?" He didn't really take note of her. It was always the same. He had never even seemed to register her existence whenever his favourite was around.  
  
"If they fight, they bleed," he said. "And if they bleed, the sharks will smell them."  
  
"Can sharks really smell things?" his father asked in an amused tone and took a spoonful of the soup. "I mean, they're underwater, aren't they?"  
  
Minkyoo, who was home early for once, was in the middle of chewing a piece of meat when he explained, "They're fish, so they can breathe and smell underwater, though obviously differently. They suck in the water and can sense smells by filtering it. A large part of their brain is made of olfactory lobes actually, and it's said that they can respond to one part blood for every one million parts of water."  
Minkyung snorted. Minkyoo always liked the part about the Great Shark in Minseok's stories best, so he had become a bit of a shark fetishist as a child, always interrupting Minseok whenever his tellings were too inaccurate.  
  
"That's quite impressive," his father nodded, and slurped down more soup. "No wonder sharks are so dangerous then."  
They all were quiet as a response to those new interesting facts about marine life, when Chanyeol said, "Yeah, but those people obviously aren't new to their life under the sea. They can just kill the sharks."  
  
Minseok didn't look up, and his expression didn't even change much, but there was this one slight movement of his eyebrow, as if he had explained something quite obvious but was met with a ridiculous reaction. "Those sharks will bleed, too, and more of them are going to come. You can't kill every shark in the sea."  
  
"How do you know if you haven't tried?" Chanyeol shrugged.  
  
Minseok didn't say anything for a few seconds, and when he suddenly slammed his chopsticks on the table, he startled his father so much that he spilt soup over his shirt. "So what? You want to kill all the sharks? What for? Just because you can't pull yourself together?"  
  
No one dared to move when the two just glared at each other.  
"Hyung, if this is about that guy," Chanyeol said. "I mean, he broke my nose and everything. I can't even sleep properly because it hurts so much, so I wasn't thinking straight."  
  
It was as if it was only them at the table, as if they didn't see the other four, and when Minkyung's mother asked, "What's wrong with you two? Minseok, did your friend hurt Chanyeol?", Minseok just stood up.  
"I'm done," he said, as he took his rice bowl and his chopsticks and placed them in the sink, before he walked to his room.  
  
"Are you arguing about something?" his mother asked and frowned at Chanyeol, who awkwardly stared at the table, obviously unsure what to do. In the end he excused himself, thanked them for the food, and went back home.  
  
"Grown-up boys like them, fighting at the dinner table," Minkyung's mother said as she shook her head in exasperation. Minkyung looked up at the second floor, where her brother probably sat in his room and brooded. Chanyeol had always been the one who managed to affect him the most.  
  
  
As children they were all close. They all played together, and their ages didn't seem to matter much, but the older they got, the further they drifted apart.  
No one really got along with Minkyoo. Yura was the second oldest, but to him that one year of age difference was excuse enough to boss her around.  
Minkyung and Chanyeol were the same age, so they were probably supposed to be the closest, but somehow they never really hit it off. She hated to be stuck with him all the time because he was silly and nasty, and to him she was 'just a girl'.  
They were a group of five, but in the centre were always Minseok and the Park siblings. No one was as obsessed with his stories as Yura, who always got the best roles, and no one admired him as much as Chanyeol, who always followed him around. The other two Kim siblings were not more than side characters, and when Minkyoo and Yura gradually left the others behind, Minkyung became a full outcast.  
  
Minseok was her brother, so she of course loved him, but she didn't even know what it was like to be alone with him. When it was just the three of them, Chanyeol always took his full attention, and Minkyung sometimes wondered whether any of them would have noticed it if she was gone. Minseok wasn't a very diligent student, so she couldn't ask him to help her with his studies, and he wasn't particularly protective. Even to Minkyoo, who was four years older, she was closer, because Minkyoo liked to play the clichéd part of the older brother.  
  
Things changed a little when Chanyeol finally entered middle school, because they were now all old enough that no one had to take care of them any longer. Minkyung went to the same school as Minseok, Chanyeol only made it into a mediocre one and finally left their life. Yura and Chanyeol became neighbours to them, people who happened to live in the house next door, but who followed a completely different path.  
But Minkyung and Minseok never grew close, not even when all her rivals were removed. It had taken her years until she understood that they just had nothing to talk about. He didn't care about his grades or his classmates or the things he learned in school. His books were covered in weird charts and random scribbles with details about story ideas he had, his notes were largely incomplete and thus incomprehensible because he never seemed to fully pay attention during his lessons. Minkyung liked school, and to her he was like an alien, no matter how much she tried to understand him.  
  
And she began to wonder whether the reason, why the Park siblings liked him so much, maybe was that he was more like them. The Kims were ordinary people with ordinary wishes and ordinary ideas. The father worked in a bank, the mother was a housewife, two of their children were ordinary good students.  
The Parks though were different. The mother sold cosmetics in a large department store and the father was a photographer. Yura was smart, beautiful and enrolled in a good university, but all she seemed to care about was fashion and her career as model. Even as a child she was strong-willed and only did what she wanted to do. Chanyeol meanwhile was a troublemaker, who didn't seem to have any goal in life. Even in their old school he had been a bit of a bully, but in middle school he constantly came home with ripped shirts and cuts and bruises. One day on her way to school Minkyung had run into him when he smoked around the bus stop.  
Minseok, as ordinary as he looked, probably was more like them than like those people whose blood he shared.  
  
But he was still her brother, and as such she was worried about him. She began worrying when he entered a terrible high school, and when she saw him hanging around with boys who looked like delinquents. And when Chanyeol enrolled at the very same school, she was sick with fear. It was as if Chanyeol had found the back door into their house, as if his ugly school uniform was a free pass.  
At first he and Minseok just sometimes came home around the same time, then Chanyeol began to stay for dinner every once in a while. Minkyung's mother knew that their neighbours barely ever ate full meals, so she probably pitied him and never said anything, no matter how messy he looked.  
  
"Come on, Minkyung, aren't you old friends? I think it's nice to have him around," she would say whenever Minkyung complained. Her mother liked him, because he wasn't her son. She didn't have to worry about his grades or his health, and she didn't think that he was a bad influence. Minkyoo and Minkyung had always been good students, Minseok she had already given up on.  
  
Minkyung's mother didn't even worry when Minseok came home in the middle of the night with a swollen eye and a sprained ankle. She never questioned anyone when Chanyeol sat at their table with a broken nose. To her the story about sharks was just silly and meaningless, like everything Minseok ever said.  
  
But Minkyung knew that they had to do something. None of them really understood Minseok, the airhead, the dreamer, the alien. None of them knew what was going on in his head, but if they weren't careful, they would lose him completely.

## The Knight with the Crooked Collar

She liked to think of herself as an onlooker, rather than a stalker. She barely ever took sneaky pictures, never waited outside buildings at night and was against theft and trespassing. She was a high school student with a crush, and knew that she wasn't even special. There were thousands like her, thousands who were in love with someone who was unreachable.

  
Lee Joohee was so ugly, even her family often made jokes about how not even surgery would have made her any prettier. Joohee was tall but fat, her skin was fair but full of red spots, her hair thick but curly. The only reason why she wasn't an outcast was that she always managed to smile, like an empty pierrot. She laughed whenever she was called 'fatty' or when boys asked her to be their bodyguard, not their girlfriend. That someone could have ever asked her out was like a distant dream, and even nice words seemed to be too much. To Joohee it was clear that she would forever be the one nobody ever even saw as a girl.

She was in her second year in middle school and already a head taller than most other girls, when her knight finally appeared. If not for him she would have given up on life, or so she sometimes thought when she sat in her room by herself.  
It was the worst day of her life. She fell on her way to her classroom and someone took a picture of her underwear when she struggled to get up. The boys in class showed the picture to each other, all pulling disgusted faces, and the girls loudly wondered about Joohee's qualities as a potential girlfriend.  
"I kind of always saw Joohee as a fat boy in a skirt to be honest," Kim Ara, the self-proclaimed queen of their class, laughed. "But I mean, the good point is that any guy looks pretty next to her. I guess it would probably really push the ego of some shy boys if they were hooking up with Joohee for like a week."

Joohee could only laugh. The moment she got angry or showed that she was hurt, she lost. She sat at her desk, and smiled her empty smile. If this was all life had to offer, she didn't want it. The humiliation would never end. She would forever spin in circles.

"Oh, shut up, Kim Ara," someone said. "If you want to push someone's ego, you should go out with them."  
It was Park Chanyeol, that one guy everyone was afraid of, and who appeared to be in a bad mood as he entered the classroom.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ara asked in an irritated tone, and he shrugged.  
"I mean, what's your face made of again? Plastic?" he said. "Lee Joohee at least looks human."

Joohee knew that it wasn't about her at all.  
Kim Ara and Park Chanyeol stopped getting along after that short period during their first year in middle school when they tried to go out and when she ended up cheating on him with one of his friends. Ara called him impotent, he broke his friend's arm, and they constantly were at war since then.  
But even though it wasn't about Joohee, did he save her. He averted everyone's attention and made them laugh about Ara instead. Thanks to him Joohee could live.

And thanks to him she learned what it was like to feel like a normal girl. If it was him, she thought that it would be okay for her to like him. She never meant to act on it, but she didn't think that he would have minded either.  
Park Chanyeol was a troublemaker. He constantly fought, but he was nice to most girls and to people weaker than himself. He smiled at her when he noticed her, and he knew her name. They ended up in the same class in the same high school and when he saw her on her first day, he said, "Oh, Lee Joohee, looks like we're together again."

She liked to watch him, not as a stalker or a creep, but as a normal girl who had a crush on a boy. She liked that he was one of the few boys who were a little taller than her, and she liked his silly face when he laughed. She liked how tough he was when he fought, and how cool he was when he argued with his teachers.  
And when she saw that other side of him he never showed in school, she weirdly liked him even more, because she had never had any hopes of being with him to begin with.

  
She heard him before she saw him. Even among the other noises in the bus, she immediately recognized his voice. It wasn't the first time she made a detour and took a different bus in the morning with all her senses focussed on discovering him.  
"Hyung, come on, you can't just ignore me all day," he said as he pushed his way through the crowd inside. He looked down to someone, but only his head could be seen from where Joohee sat. "If you want me to apologize, fine. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have hit your friend."  
They stopped almost right in front of her, both facing the window, although Park Chanyeol still looked at the boy next to him instead of the scenery outside or the people around him. "I mean, what else do you want?"

The boy didn't say a word and used his left hand to grab the hanging strap in front of him, as if he wanted to use his arm as a barrier between him and Park Chanyeol. He stared at the world passing by in a weirdly impassive way that seemed to unnerve Park Chanyeol. It was the first time that Joohee saw him with such a distressed face.

"Hyung," he said after sheer endless moments of burdensome silence. "Look, I already killed the sharks around me. I started killing them ages ago, so if I stop now, the others will eat me. I can't stop. I just can't. This is the life I'm leading now. I'm already at the bottom of the sea."

"Do what you want," the boy said in a weirdly distant way.

Park Chanyeol knit his brows, and pressed his lips together as he turned to the window. He was so tall, rather than to use the hanging straps, he held the bar they were attached to. It looked funny. He was a giant in a messy uniform, the boy next to him was a dwarf, all neat and authoritarian. Joohee hadn't known that there was anyone Park Chanyeol would respect.

It was then that there was a sudden jolt, and that all the people who were standing slightly lost their balance. Joohee almost dropped her bag, a girl loudly crashed into a businessman's newspaper, and the boy bumped into Park Chanyeol, who automatically protectively put his arm around him.  
And something...  
Something just...  
Something about it made Joohee's heart race.  
"You okay?" Park Chanyeol asked and the boy nodded, as he freed himself.  
It was maybe the way Park Chanyeol's hand lingered on the boy's back a little too long, or the way the boy suddenly looked as if he lost some of his resoluteness. Whatever it was, Joohee knew that she witnessed something special, something normal people weren't allowed to see.

"Hyung, it's just," Park Chanyeol quietly said. "I need you."

The bus stopped. "Don't make me pick sides then," the boy said as he left, and a crowd of students divided them as they all pushed towards the exit. Park Chanyeol hurriedly ran after the boy, and Joohee was behind them.

  
Lee Joohee wasn't a stalker, but an onlooker. There were thousands like her, thousands who took pictures of the ones they liked. Everything she saw were things that happened in public, so she didn't even really invade anyone's privacy.

She liked to watch Park Chanyeol, whether he fought or took a nap in class or annoyed his friends. She liked to see all his facets, so when she witnessed him pulling the short boy behind the school that morning, she didn't really think much about following them.

She took the picture for herself, because the moment was special, because she had never seen Park Chanyeol in such a vulnerable state.

She never meant to be in his way. She just liked to watch.

But in the end she wasn't worth it. She was ugly and dumb and worthless.  
Someone like her wasn't meant to like someone else.

"What are you looking at, fatty?" Kim Ara asked and took her phone.

## Slash and Burn

"High school is like being stuck in a jungle," Minseok once said. "You can't see anything but what's right in front of you. If you stay behind you'll be lost forever, but even if you move on, you don't know if you'll ever find the way out. You don't know how big the jungle is, or whether there even is an end to it. Dangers are behind every corner. Things you lost turn up, and people who you thought you would always be with are suddenly gone when you turn around."

Wu Yifan liked the image, because it seemed to describe everything he had felt ever since middle school. Girl were like exotic birds and noisy monkeys, boys wanted to be tigers and turned into gorillas. The people around him became wild animals, obsessed with sex and games and gossip. Some were happy with being stuck, others would forever run, but no one ever broke free.

"Make the jungle yours then," Yifan said. "Burn down as much space as you need and turn it into your turf."

Wu Yifan couldn't stand half-assed things. If high school was a jungle, he was the tribe leader using the slash-and-burn method. Whatever stood in his way would have to go, and if the first graders wanted to fight him, they would have to accept the consequences.

"So what exactly do you want me to do with this?" he asked as he looked at the picture on the girl's phone. "Is this the guy who hit my friends?"

"Yeah," she said as he handed it back. "It's him, but I'm not sure about the other guy." She shrugged. "And I figured you might like any information that could help you destroy your enemies."

"I'm not a girl, so I'm afraid I'm missing your point here," he said and was about to turn away. There was nothing to expect from a conversation with girls from grade one. It probably was a ridiculous trap, set up by one of the little shits. He wasn't new to idiotic battle strategies and female scapegoats.

She sighed, when she blocked his way and waved her phone in front of his face. "Look closely," she said impatiently. "Is there nothing you find odd about the picture? Does that look like a hug between friends to you?" When he just raised an eyebrow at her, she angrily continued, "Park Chanyeol isn't normal. I went out with him before, so I know, and this is the proof. He's fucking gay."

He frowned at her for a second, and then scoffed, "Wow, is that what they call a bad break-up? Is everyone who dumped you gay?"

"Shut up," she snapped and angrily threw her phone in the pocket of her jacket. "You don't get it. You can't fight Park Chanyeol like normal guys. He doesn't care if you hurt him, he doesn't even care if his friends get hurt. This is your only chance. That boy in the picture might be his blind spot."

And Yifan understood.  
It wasn't a trap, and the information she offered was nothing he cared about. Blackmail was below him, and his own fights he wanted to win in an honest way. Whether that boy fucked girls, boys or dogs, he didn't care. Even without dirty tricks he had managed to rise to the top, so he wasn't going to step down to a little girl's level. He was a fighter, a leader, a man.

But it was a fact that the first graders were already much too close. They singled out one of his friends, and attacked like wild dogs. They had no respect, no sense of decency and that boy called Park Chanyeol in particular already was like a thorn in his flesh.

The girl could be Yifan's fire to burn down the jungle of the first graders. She was furious, she was hysterical, she came to him because he was her enemy's biggest foe, and he wouldn't even have to get his hands dirty.  
The first graders didn't have a leader, they were nothing more than a loose collection of angry children who couldn't accept that they weren't in middle school any longer. All it took was a spark, enough to erase one of their unstable pillars, and they would blow up. If the girl wanted to take her pathetic revenge on one of her own, fine, he would support her with all his heart.

"So what's your plan?" he asked.

Her name was Kim Ara and she caused an inferno.

  
When he came to school the next day, there was the same message written at the blackboards of every single classroom: 'If you want to know the truth about the Forbidden Love of Park Chanyeol (Grade 1 Class 3), access the following link.'

The link lead to a blog Kim Ara had specifically created for her great defamation coup. It included the picture and a story which, Yifan guessed, was largely made up. She didn't even know who the other boy was, and yet she had written an 'interview' with him which 'disclosed their rabid affair' in more vivid details than Yifan had ever cared to read. Kim Ara had immediately sent it to him in her fierce eagerness, and he honestly wondered just what her aim really was.  
She must have entered the school at night or early in the morning, so that Park Chanyeol wouldn't know it was her.

"Girls are scary," he muttered under his breath, when the first students in his class used their phones to access the blog, and unwillingly had to laugh at Kim Ara's viciously crazy creativity. She exaggerated so much, to him it seemed more likely that she had completely lost it, rather than to assume that some picture of Park Chanyeol and some other boy said anything about their sexuality.

"What's that?" Luhan asked when he entered the classroom, and looked at the phone of the first person he saw.

"Feminine warfare," Yifan answered and felt weirdly content. It was a dirty method, but it was incredibly satisfying to watch his foes detroying themselves. The very guy who fought with Luhan and Minseok was now struck down by his own karma.

But it probably was all much too easy.

"Shit," Luhan said and sharply sucked in the air through his mouth. He looked around in panic, and then ran to the blackboard to erase the message.

"What's wrong?" Yifan asked, and Luhan stared at him as if he was dealing with a complete blockhead.  
"Did you even look at the picture?" Luhan asked, as he hurried through the door and into the next classroom. Yifan followed behind, not really understanding a thing. "That's Minseok," Luhan said.

"What? Are you sure?"

Luhan stopped and looked at him disbelievingly. "Are you fucking stupid, Wu Yifan? You were in the same class for three years now and you don't even recognize his damn backpack?"

"Wait, what?"

"That tall kid is his dongsaeng," Luhan explained and shook his head in exasperation, as he frantically ran along the corridor. "They grew up together."

  
_High school is like being stuck in a jungle.  
You can't see anything but what's right in front of you._

  
They reached the classrooms of the first grade, their enemies' territory, when Yifan bumped into Luhan because he abruptly stopped.  
Park Chanyeol calmly leaned against the window frame in front of his classroom and looked at his phone, as giggling girls walked by. There probably was no use trying to make sure that no one found the link in his class. Kim Ara must have spread it everywhere.

"Here to celebrate your triumph?" Park Chanyeol asked and smiled as he looked up. "I didn't know our great sunbaes had such a creative streak."

"That has nothing to do with us," Luhan said decisively. "We're only here to-."

"I don't really care what you're here for," Chanyeol interrupted him and lazily waved his hand as he put his phone into his back pocket. "Unless you're prepared to die, that is."

  
_High school is like being stuck in a jungle.  
If you stay behind you'll be lost forever, but even if you move on, you don't know if you'll ever find the way out.  
You don't know how big the jungle is, or whether there even is an end to it.  
And if you burn down everything around you, you might end up destroying more than just a few plants._

## Villainy

"Okay, if I'm the school janitor, as you say, and you're the mayor and Minkyungie the mermaid, what's Minseok doing?" he had asked and the little boy with the big ears and the ugly glasses had given him a nasty look.

"Are you an idiot?" he had asked and it was quite obvious that the reason for his annoyance wasn't just the newcomer's lack of understanding about the rules. "Minseok-hyung isn't in the story. He's the storyteller."

Minseok had given Luhan an apologizing smile while patting the little boy's head.  
They had been in their first year in middle school then and Luhan thought he had already forgotten about it. It was the first time he met Park Chanyeol, long before all the trouble in high school even started.

No one in Minseok's family had given Luhan a warm welcome.  
"Your name doesn't sound very Korean," his mother had said vaguely.  
"China? Isn't that where they eat rats and jellyfish?" his sister Minkyung had asked with a shocked expression.  
It had instantly made him regret the decision to tag along when Minseok had to fetch his sister and the neighbour's boy from their primary school. Their houses were relatively close and Luhan didn't have siblings himself, so to him it had sounded like a fun idea. What he hadn't expected though, was that Minseok indeed was from a very average middle-class family.

"Don't be friends with Minseok-hyung. You look like a bad guy," little Park Chanyeol had said, and Luhan had oddly found his direct animosity easiest to deal with. Little Minkyung purposely ignored him, but little Chanyeol hit him and Luhan could just put him in a headlock. He had thought it was cute that Minseok's neighbour would be so protective of him.

Five years later, when nothing about Park Chanyeol's behaviour had changed, though, he instead worried. It wasn't cute any longer. Park Chanyeol had become a madman.

  
"You make me hate you for hurting my friend," Minseok had yelled in the rain. "Is that what you want? Do you want me to attack you now?"  
And Park Chanyeol had immediately stopped, as if he was a robot whose switch had been turned off. Minseok hadn't looked back and as he and Luhan had walked to the bus stop, both soaking wet, none of them had uttered a word.

"Sorry about that," Minseok had finally said as they stood in their bus home.

"What are you apologizing for?" Luhan had shrugged while touching his bruised lip. The situation just prove that violence created more violence. He had taken revenge for Minseok, Park Chanyeol had then taken revenge for. "You're not the one who hit me."

"I know, but," Minseok sighed and adjusted the strap of his dripping backpack. "It's my fault, in a way. He hates bruises in his face."

Luhan grimaced at that. "What, is he a girl? Why is he fighting people if he cares so much about his looks?"

"That's not it," Minseok snorted and suddenly looked a tad less glum and miserable, as he put his hand in front of his face. "If a part of your head hurts, it's like your vision is blocked. It's easy to ignore pain in other parts of your body, but if it's the face, then the pain is right in front of you. If your leg hurts, stand on the other one. If you right fist hurts, use the left one. But if your face face hurts, it's hard to look tough," he explained with a smile, and when Luhan just frowned at him, he added, "Or so he says."

"Right," Luhan said and looked at the rainy world outside. It somehow was hard to feel sympathetic for someone else's pain issues when one's own face was hurt. "But I mean, he's the one who started it. I hit him because he hit you first."

"That was an accident," Minseok said, and Luhan turned around to him in disbelief.

"Kim Minseok, what are you, a masochist? Just how apologetic are you going to be for that guy?"

"Look," Minseok said and avoided his gaze. "In primary school we came up with this thing called Strategy M to annoy my brother. Chanyeol, his sister and I practised to fake a fight. We wanted him to panic and to call our parents, only to act normal the moment they would come back. In the end it didn't work because Minkyung told him though." He smiled at the memory, and Luhan pulled a face.

"So you're saying that the thing a few days ago was fake?" Luhan finally asked and raised an eyebrow when Minseok nodded. "Why did you get hurt then?"

"That was the accident."

Luhan wanted to argue against it, but he knew that there was no use. They had been friends since middle school, so he knew that all his arguments were futile the moment Minseok was convinced of something.

  
Kim Minseok looked like he was easily bullied, and to most people it seemed like a mere coincidence that he would be friends with Wu Yifan and the other leaders of the third grade. To outsiders he seemed like a lackey, that's why the first graders hadn't hesitated in attacking him. Luhan wasn't so stupid to think that it was Park Chanyeol who picked him as a victim. Park Chanyeol was just the weapon, the fist of the mass of wild boys, who wanted to provoke the 'Core', as students in lower grades called them. They didn't understand the position Minseok held and had no clue that everyone belonging to the Core would come running to help him.

Minseok was like a shadow leader. He wasn't loud, he didn't like to fight, but whenever he said something or wanted something there were people who would listen to him. It was maybe because he never yielded, always stubbornly following his own ideas, or maybe because he had a way of making it sound as if his words were definite. It was hard to explain, but even people like Wu Yifan, the classical leader type, ultimately respected him.

In a way it actually made sense that someone like Park Chanyeol would be so obsessed with him. Park Chanyeol was like a landslide or a seismic wave, Minseok was like an inconspicious rock that wouldn't budge. Park Chanyeol probably needed someone who could stop him.

But Luhan and Minseok were friends, so he didn't want him to become a victim in the mess Park Chanyeol created. Even if it was a cowardly move, Park Chanyeol had no one to blame but himself when someone spread those news about his private life around school.  
And, even worse, because he had so little control over himself, Minseok was about to be dragged into the whole issue.

"Well, shit," Luhan said, when a couple of first graders appeared behind them. They were trapped.

"What are those guys doing here?" someone asked, and Luhan's mind was racing. They could still run, there was no use fighting anyway. They were in the minority, so they were guaranteed to lose. But Yifan wouldn't agree to act like a coward.

"They're probably here to enjoy the show," a girl smiled as she came out of Park Chanyeol's classroom. "I heard there were some quite interesting news about Chanyeol. He seems to enjoy a nice little spanking by hot boys."  
And something about her words made the fronts shift. The first graders looked insecure, as if they weren't sure whose side they were standing on, if there even was a side they had to choose. It didn't matter that Yifan and Luhan were there, the centre of everyone's attention was Park Chanyeol, who had no one who felt the urge to defend him, Park Chanyeol, the potentially gay boy who might misunderstand other guys' help.

It was ridiculous and prove that the first graders weren't one yet. They had more than two years left, two years during which they had to stabilize their power before they even had a chance to attack others, two years during which all their old opponents would leave. Nothing was decided yet. The winners of the beginning stages could easily become victims themselves.

Park Chanyeol still grinned. "Oh, Ara-yah, what a clever plan," he clapped and averted his attention from the third graders in his turf. He slowly turned into her direction, with a smile like a hungry crocodile. "I mean, how am I supposed to defend myself here? I'm still a guy, right? So you probably thought, 'what can that guy possibly do to me? He can't pull my hair or slap me after all, even if he sucks dicks.' Am I right, Ara-yah?"  
He walked towards her, and she instinctively took a step backwards. "I mean, you're a girl, right? Guys don't hit girls." He nodded as if he pondered over that fact, and still grinned at her as he grabbed the neck of a boy who stood next tor her and smashed his head into the door. She shrieked. And he laughed.  
"Ara-yah, you're of course right. Guys shouldn't hit girls. But say, don't you have a little brother? What did you say his name was? Taehwan?"  
He walked to another group of bystanders and when they too moved back, he kicked one of them down.  
"So how about this? I can't hurt you, right? But I'm sure Taehwanie wouldn't mind if I come to meet him. Say, do plastic faces break if you hit them?"  
He was going mad. Like a blind madman he started to attack his classmates and friends, those people whose side he was supposedly standing on, and at first no one knew how to react. Someone tried to hold him back, only to be elbowed in the face. The girls ran away, boys from neighbouring classrooms appeared in the corridor, but Park Chanyeol didn't seem to care. His fist connecting with a body, cries of pain, others who stormed towards him, there didn't seem to be much else to him.

"What the fuck is he doing?" Yifan asked and Luhan sighed.  
"Isn't that what you wanted? A complete carnage?"

"Shit, pull yourself together," someone exclaimed as they locked his arms from behind and forced him on his knees. "We're not your fucking enemies."  
But it was already too late. The enemy line had blurred, and when Park Chanyeol's friends appeared the mess only grew worse. Someone kicked the boy who held him, someone else headbutted him.

"Are you happy now?" Luhan asked. "Because I'm fairly sure that Minseok won't be."  
Yifan clicked his tongue as he left and Luhan shook his head. Someone punched Park Chanyeol's face and he winced in pain for a second, as blood started to stream down his face.  
Luhan didn't care if he got hurt, because it was his own fault. But he knew that the outcome of the whole mess wouldn't be pleasant for anyone who was involved.

  
He still faintly heard the shouts, when he went back to his classroom and when he met Minseok on the staircase.  
"I don't think you should go down," Luhan said, before Minseok even had the chance to utter anything. "It's a fight among first graders. It's not just him. You can't stop them all."  
Minseok was about to walk by without a word, so he continued pleadingly, "I mean, think about it. He's fighting for himself there, so if you suddenly appear you'll only make it worse."

Minseok halted, obviously hesitating. "I can't just do nothing," he said.

"Why?" Luhan asked. "What's happening downstairs is not about you at all. That fight is a fight Park Chanyeol picked himself, so right now you can only wait until it passes."

Minseok clenched his fist. He wasn't going to listen. He never did.  
Whatever he wanted, he would do, even if it meant to jump straight into an abyss.

## The Village Under the Sea

A long, long time ago, there was a village near the sea that was eaten up by a big wave. It disappeared from all the maps and soon everyone forgot about it.  
  
But the village was still there, just not where it originally was. All the houses and fences and streets dropped into the sea. Corals replaced the trees and the flowers. Octopuses and crabs moved into the houses, fish went to school.  
  
The villagers didn't die either. They were so lazy, they didn't even notice they were under the sea as they floated in their houses.  
  
That was where the story ended when they were children. At first they all loved the story, but in the end it felt like a tired reminder of the way they used to be.  
Yura hated it in the end because there was no heroine, and she didn't want to be a fish. Minkyung liked to be a mermaid, but didn't want to play with the villagers, and Minkyoo only cared about the Great Shark. They all grew apart, and to the others the story probably was the ultimate proof that Minseok would forever be a useless dreamer. As children they all looked up to him, all excited and full of ideas, but the older they got, the more he seemed to annoy them.  
  
"Grow up, Minseok," Minkyoo would say.  
"Oh, aren't you cute?" Yura would smile.  
"Oppa, stop dreaming already," Minkyung would sigh.  
  
The last one who still cared about his stories was Chanyeol, maybe because he was the youngest. When everyone else had already stopped listening, Chanyeol would cuddle up to him with the same conspirational smile.  
"Hyung, what do you think? Who is going to win, Minkyoo-hyung or the Great Shark?"  
  
They would both secretly look at Minkyoo and Minseok would shrug, "If they're in a math competition, probably Minkyoo-hyung."  
  
"You sure? I bet he won't even be able to hold his pen around the Great Shark," Chanyeol would chuckle.  
  
But they all had to grow up eventually and reality caught up with them.  
  
  
It was weird how easily they grew apart. Minkyoo and Yura wanted to become adults, so they didn't have any time for their younger siblings. They had their own relationships now and their own worries. Good grades, compatible friends, a prosperous future, things like that mattered to them now.  
Minkyung eventually was the same. She was younger than him, and yet she told him to study and to try harder. She never fully ignored him, but her apparent disappointment in him was like a burden.  
  
His relationship with Chanyeol meanwhile became incredibly awkward. They both were the black sheep in their families, and as puberty hit them the two years between them suddenly made a difference. At first it was him who accidentally left Chanyeol behind. Now that all his friends were the same age as him and that he didn't have to take care of Minkyung any longer, it felt weird to talk to someone younger. Chanyeol was a child, he was a teenager. It was stupid, but to his self then it mattered.  
Chanyeol usually greeted him if they ran into each other on their way home, but it never turned into a conversation. At some point they just exchanged nods, then they largely ignored each other. Minseok stopped growing at some point in middle school, and Chanyeol slowly turned into a complete stranger. He became taller, and his voice deeper, and in the end Minseok unwillingly felt intimidated whenever he saw him. Chanyeol, the teenager, had turned into a genuine troublemaker, and although Minseok was used to guys like him, did it unsettle him exactly because he used to be friends with his kid version.  
  
It made him feel stupid because he held onto old memories too much. He still thought about the village under the sea and the Great Shark. He still saw Yura as a queen, and Minkyoo as the king who wasn't married to her, and Minkyung as the noisy princess or the studious mermaid. It didn't feel right that he still remembered Chanyeol as the child who always made him tell stories and who readily became the villain if it meant that he could annoy the older children.  
It didn't feel right because the clocks never stopped ticking, They would all have to become adults, but Minseok always seemed to be a little behind.  
  
And then, suddenly, time seemed to float, moving both forwards and backwards at the same time.  
  
  
It was the first day of his last year in high school, and he was about to open the door to his house, when someone behind him said, "Minseok-hyung." He didn't even recognize the voice because it had changed so much, so when he turned around and saw Chanyeol waving at him, he accidentally dropped his keys. "Hyung, I'm not sure if you already noticed it," Chanyeol smiled and happily pointed at his brand new black school uniform. "But we're officially sunbae and hoobae again."  
  
Chanyeol, the high school student, entered his life as if they had never been apart. He greeted him in the morning, chatted him up in their bus to school, and even followed him home sometimes. Chanyeol was a feared delinquent, but the moment he was outside the school grounds he acted like the child he used to be. As if nothing had ever happened he sat at their dinner table, talking to Minkyoo and Minkyung and his parents, never really minding that they obviously looked down on him and his happy nature.  
His parents allowed Chanyeol into their house because it made them feel a little less bad about their real son. Chanyeol was even more of a failure than Minseok, at least to them. They had never taken him and his family very serious, as if the Parks were some kind of welfare case, just because they weren't so obsessed with being average. So they also didn't really care whether they made Minseok look bad in front of Chanyeol.  
  
"Oh, Minkyoo, please, stop acting as if your brother was already living under a bridge. Life will always go on, no matter what kind of decisions we make, and it's our duty as a family to look out for each other," his mother said and made it sound as if he in fact already was unemployed and a burden.  
  
"All I'm saying is that he has to get his act together for once," Minkyoo argued. "Just look at his grades. It will be hard for him to get into a university if he doesn't wake up now. Do you think he will find a decent job without a university degree? I mean, just look at-." He paused, and his eyes widened a little as he looked at Chanyeol who was happily chewing his vegetables. Minseok knew the example Minkyoo had meant to mention.  
'Just look at the Parks. The father is a freelance photographer who is barely home because he takes on any kind of offer to make ends meet. The mother works all day in a department store, selling cosmetics to middle-aged ladies, and had so little time for their children, they too became no-goods. The oldest daughter is smart but wants to earn money as a model, the younger brother already is scum.'  
The Parks were like an antithesis to their perfect family life, and forgotten were the times they spent together as children.  
  
And Minseok had it, so he hurriedly finished eating and went back to his room. Chanyeol followed, and Minseok had barely shut the door behind him, when he heard Minkyung again, "Mom, why don't you stop Chanyeol from staying? He'll ruin Minseok-oppa even more."  
  
Minseok stared at him, and Chanyeol snorted. "Good to know that Minkyung is still as fierce as ever. I thought it was strange that she didn't kick my shin as I walked through the door."  
It was weird how he smiled, and cheerfully sat down at Minseok's desk while randomly opening a text book, just as if Minkyung's word had nothing to do with him.  
  
"Sorry," Minseok said and sat down on his bed while rubbing his face. "I wish I could say that she doesn't mean it."  
  
"I don't mind," Chanyeol shrugged and suddenly laughed as he showed Minseok the page where he had drawn beards and glasses on the faces of some historical figures whose names he couldn't remember. "Hyung, how old are you again?" he grinned, and turned back. "But anyway, I'm not hanging around your house because I want Minkyung's approval anyway, but because your mother is a good cook, and because I can't talk to you in school."  
  
Minseok snorted, and looked at Chanyeol's figure at the desk. Sometimes he really envied him for his single-mindedness.  
  
They sat in silence for a while, when Chanyeol abruptly turned his head around and gave him an odd look. "Hyung, I can't help but notice that you seem to be in quite a bad mood, so let me tell you an uplifting story," he formally announced. "You see, hyung, there's something you already achieved, that none of your siblings will ever achieve." Minseok frowned and Chanyeol dramatically sighed, "You kind of influenced my first break-up."  
  
"That doesn't sound particularly uplifting," Minseok said glumly, because he honestly didn't want to hear yet another accusation.  
  
"Just wait and see," Chanyeol said and fully turned around. "I'm new to the whole storytelling business, so bear with me here." He straightened his back, placed his hands one his knees and took a deep breath, before he put on as mischievous expression when Minseok looked at him expectantly.  
"Okay, hyung, you probably remember that we last left off when the hero, that's me, had just become the mayor of the village under the sea, right?"  
  
Minseok blinked. He did remember but it still startled him a little that someone else would. Sometimes it felt as if he was the only one who was still left under the sea.  
His suprise seemed to have the effect Chanyeol had counted on, so he continued in a even more lively way, "Well, anyway, he was a mayor for a while and everything was perfectly fine. He had his own supporters, but also opponents, which is, I guess, quite normal for a politician. But you know, there was something the mayor was lacking, and he only realized it when one of his consultants told him. 'Sir, for the sake of improving your public relations, how about finding a wife?' he asked, and the mayor had to admit that he certainly was in that age when most men were married.  
"But you see, there was no one in particular he liked, so he just picked them by face. I mean, he was a really good-looking mayor, so he obviously had the free choice," Chanyeol grinned, and Minseok pulled a face.  
  
"That's not uplifting, that's just you showing off," he said, and Chanyeol laughed.  
  
"Come one, hyung, that's of course not the end of the story. I told you that it ends with a break-up, so there has to be a relationship first, right?" Chanyeol asked in mocked indignation. "So, yeah, anyway, the mayor picked the prettiest woman in town. Her face looked a little fake, but well, his family was literally made of people obsessed with beauty, so he wanted to make sure that they would like her, too. His mother once told him that she wanted his wife to be at least as pretty as her sister, because she wanted even prettier grandchildren." He frowned at the memory and halted his story for a few seconds.  
"Well," he then continued. "But then he realized that to hook up with someone wasn't really the end of the story. It wasn't just that the girl was a little annoying, he kind of missed that feeling other guys usually described. He kissed her and everything, but even when he touched her boobs, he never got excited. He really tried not to let it show, but she must have noticed it, so she provoked him and slept with one of his consultants. But even then he didn't really feel hurt. He couldn't accept the betrayal, of course, but secretly he felt relieved. And it scared him."  
Chanyeol paused again and looked at his hands. Minseok was about to comment that the story still didn't seem particularly bright, but then decided not to. Something about it unsettled him.  
  
"So the mayor decided to talk to a wise person, his grandmother, who kind of was the only adult who ever really listened to him, probably because her husband and all her friends were so senile, it was no fun to talk to them," Chanyeol continued in a free-spirited way. "And his grandmother asked if there was anyone else he liked. He of course said no, there was no one he could think of after all, or else he would have married them, and she narrowed his eyes at him. What about his first love? Was he still hung up about that? He shook his head, because he never had a first love, and she sighed. 'You're like your grandfather and your father before you,' she said. 'You probably need someone to tell you that you're in love. Think about it, think really hard. Is there anyone you sometimes suddenly think of? Someone you really miss when they're not around?' He told her that he'd know if there was someone like that, and they left it at that. He was probably a late bloomer, she said, but as he was on his way home, he noticed something. You know, coincidentally he saw the storyteller in the same bus, and it somehow made him really angry. Ever since the storyteller left him behind in the sea, nothing ever really worked out for him. I mean, what's a story without someone who leads it?" he asked and gave Minseok and odd look that somehow made him really uncomfortable.  
  
"And then he knew," Chanyeol said. "Ah, so that's what it was, he thought. He never realized it because his first love was someone he wasn't supposed to be in love with. They weren't even in the same world. He couldn't reach out to him, he could only follow. Because his first love was the storyteller." There was an awkward silence before Chanyeol added, "Well, and now that he knew, he kind of broke his consultant's arm and divorced his wife. The End."  
  
Minseok just stared at him for a few seconds. "What?" he then asked irritatedly.  
  
Chanyeol just shrugged. "I mean, okay, the content itself maybe isn't that uplifting," he admitted. "And I'm not trying to blame anything on you here. The girl was a bitch, so I would have broken up with her either way. And yeah, in a way I just selfishly wanted to get that off my chest, but I mean, think about it. Don't people like to hear that they were someone else's first love? I don't think that anyone ever really made such a heart-felt confession to Minkyoo-hyung."  
  
"Wait, I mean, what?" Minseok blurted out. "What are you even talking about?"  
  
"Hyung, look," Chanyeol said pacifyingly. "Do you remember how many fights I picked with Chanok-noona and Minkyung as a kid? The reason was always you, in a way."  
  
Minseok nodded, because he did remember, but he had always thought that they just didn't get along. Chanyeol didn't have a brother, so it seemed natural for him to cling to the boy next door who was closest in age to him.  
"What about now then?" Minseok then asked.  
  
"Now? Now noona and Minkyung both pretty much ignore me," he said and when he noticed that Minseok meant something else, he added, "Oh, and right now I'm so nervous, I might piss my pants at any moment. I never had that with a girl."  
  
"You don't look nervous though," Minseok stated and it felt more and more like a joke.  
  
"Yeah, well, I have a good poker face," Chanyeol said.  
  
It just had to be a joke. "So what do you want me to do now?"  
  
"Nothing," Chanyeol shrugged. "I'm not a creep or anything. I just want you to cheer up. I mean, that's probably weird coming from someone like me who is even further down the career ladder, but what I'm trying to say is that there's not just one way in life. People say that I'm fucking up my life, but how can they tell that I have no future? There's always a way and there will always be people who like you exactly because you are who you are and because you do what you do."  
  
  
It was odd, because even after the confession nothing changed. Minseok never replied to it, and Chanyeol didn't leave either, just as if it had never happened.  
He didn't know what to think.  
And things weren't as simple as they had been when they were children.  
  
He and Chanyeol were childhood friends, so they fell back into those old roles when they were outside. Chanyeol followed him and supported him, like a pet that only needed its owners presence to be content. It was a little awkward for the first couple of days, but Chanyeol never asked for more, and Minseok began to wonder whether he maybe just misunderstood something about the whole story.  
  
The problem was that Chanyeol in school was completely different. They stood at opposing ends because of a stupid war that broke out every year, always between the first and the third grade. Minseok had accidentally become friends with the winners in his grade, and Chanyeol was one of the fresh delinquents everyone was scared of.  
Minseok had known him since young, so he knew that Chanyeol just needed a way to vent his frustration. He liked to fight and to power himself out, so that he could go home without worries. Even as a child he had often come home with bruises and a smile.  
But it was tiring. Chanyeol in school provoked his friends and had an eerie presence, Chanyeol at home ranted a lot and laughed when Minseok compared the people around them to animals in a jungle.  
  
And then the lines blurred, and they suddenly were in a direct confrontation.  
It probably just was a question of time until he would get dragged into the fight. He was friends with Wu Yifan, for reasons he himself didn't fully understand, all he had done was to tell some awkward stories after all, and Chanyeol was his enemy, at least as long as they wore their school uniforms and were surrounded by their classmates.  
But Chanyeol weirdly tried to protect him anyway, in the only way that he probably figured wouldn't have even more negative consequences.  
"Strategy M, hyung," he whispered as he lightly put Minseok in a headlock. "Just play along and I'll get you out."  
  
But Strategy M had never really worked, not when they were children and accidentally caused each other bruises, only to be ratted on by Minkyung, and not now when they both ended up hurt.  
Chanyeol was incredibly apologetic, and Minseok just wanted to avoid him, so he tagged along when Yifan invited him and the others to his house. He felt terrible, but he somehow didn't want to be faced with Chanyeol in the bus, who would tell him how sorry he was. The back and forth funnily annoyed him, because he didn't even had a chance to get angry.  
  
When he finally went home, he met Chanyeol anyway though, because he probably couldn't escape. The struggle was in his house and his school and everywhere he went. He knew Chanyeol hadn't meant it, so there was nothing he could say, but the whole incident had already changed something about their relationship. Chanyeol now also saw him in school, not as part of his enemy group, but as the person whose house he invaded. That's why he attacked Luhan, not as a first grader attacking a third grader, but as Chanyeol, the little brother, who didn't like Minseok's friend.  
And Minseok knew that they had to stop.  
It couldn't work, not as friends and enemies at the same time.  
  
It was probably then that the picture was taken.  
  
  
Minseok tried to firmly keep his standpoint. If Chanyeol couldn't stop fighting, they couldn't be friends. Minseok was not going to choose. It was as easy as that.  
But Chanyeol wouldn't let the conversation end, and dragged him all the way behind the school.  
  
"Hyung, it's not that I want you to pick sides," Chanyeol urgently said. "I'll try to leave your friends alone, just-."  
  
"Don't," he interrupted him. "Don't leave them alone. You said that you can't stop fighting the sharks, didn't you? Then don't. We're the sharks, so feel free to fight us. Isn't that the decision you already made? Just don't use me as an excuse for anything."  
  
"Hyung, please," Chanyeol said and took his wrist to hold him back, when he was about to go. "I can't stop fighting. But I still want us to be friends."  
  
"Why?" Minseok asked and looked at Chanyeol's hand that connected them. He held on too tightly. "Do you want me to watch over you for the rest of your life? Because I'm the storyteller?"  
Chanyeol put on the same tiringly sorry expression and Minseok angrily used his free hand to grab the front Chanyeol's shirt to pull him so close that there was only a small gap between them left. Chanyeol immediately let go of Minseok's hand and looked at him warily. "You see, here's the problem," Minseok said. "The rules have changed. I'm a player myself now and I also need someone to tell me what to do."  
He was going overboard, he was definitely going overboard then, but he was sick of it. He didn't want to be under the sea, always drifting. Every story needed a conclusion, and this would be theirs.  
"So what is it you want?" he asked and aggressively threw his arm around his neck to pull his head down. "This? The kind of relationship you can't seem to have with a girl? Or do you want us to bash each other's heads in until there's only one of us left standing?"  
Chanyeol weakly held onto his shoulder, and Minseok forcefully pushed him off himself. "I mean, wake up, Park Chanyeol. You're not a child anymore. You can't have everything at once."  
  
Someone must have taken the picture then, before he walked away without waiting for a reply.  
He neither wanted to be the hero nor the bad boy, that's why he had never liked to become a character in his stories. He didn't want to play an active part, he never wanted things, he had no influence on, to happen because of him.  
If his friends fought because of him, he would have to go.  
  
But life wasn't that easy.  
Two days later the school was in an uproar and the reason was him, him who had gone overboard.  
  
  
It was odd that they didn't recognize him as they showed him the picture. But he probably didn't really stick out next to Chanyeol. His face was very much hidden as well.  
"Ew, just look at that. Isn't that the boy who lead the attack on you the other day?" the girl said with a mocked shudder, and it was especially ridiculous because he had previously heard her mention that it was a pity that Chanyeol was a bully. "You should be glad that he didn't get rough with you in, you know, a different way."  
  
They laughed, but Minseok felt numb. It was a misunderstanding. And it was his fault, but he couldn't just clarify it without causing even more trouble.  
  
"They're fighting downstairs," someone else said as they excitedly ran into the classroom. "Looks like Park Chanyeol's ex-girlfriend wrote that blog."  
  
The mayor's ex-wife.  
  
It was stupid, but if not for Minseok something like that wouldn't have happened.  
  
So he walked out of the room and towards the stairs, without a real plan. He met Luhan who tried to hold him back, but he couldn't just stop. He was a protagonist of the story now, so he couldn't just act as if he had no idea what was going on. If Chanyeol was the one who started the fight, he just had to stop him to end it.  
  
But he still wasn't so sure what to do, not even when he already stood at the outer edges of the conflict. A first grader bumped into him when someone shoved him, someone else accidentally kicked him because his actual opponent had avoided him, and then he saw Chanyeol at the end of the corridor. Chanyeol wiped his bleeding nose with his sleeve, before he kicked someone who tried to wrestle him down.  
Chanyeol's nose was already broken.  
Chanyeol hated bruises in his face.  
Chanyeol couldn't even look out for himself.  
And before Minseok really knew just what he was trying to achieve, he ran. He dodged and jumped and pushed his way through. Someone fell in front of him, almost pulling him down. He tripped and stood up again, and when he reached Chanyeol he didn't even hesitate, he just shoved him backwards.  
"What the?" Chanyeol exclaimed, and blindly hit Minseok's back with his elbow.  
  
"Stop hurting the storyteller," Minseok hissed, and Chanyeol immediately seemed to weaken, like a man who succumbed to his fate as a maelstrom pulled him down.  
  
  
They ran like children in war who still heard the missiles behind them, and only slowed down when they were already way past the bike stands.  
"Hyung," Chanyeol said, and abruptly forced him to stop. "Hyung, just how much further do you plan on going?" He accusingly held up their hands Minseok couldn't remember connecting. "And what's this now? Isn't this you picking my side? I thought you've had it with me."  
  
"I'm not picking sides," Minseok meekly said and let go of Chanyeol's hand to search his pocket for his handkerchief. "I'm taking responsibility for my actions."  
  
"Right," Chanyeol scoffed and moved away when Minseok attempted to wipe the blood off his face. "Don't, if that thing means anything to you. Blood stains are no joke. My mother already refused to wash my clothes any longer because of them." He was about to wipe his nose with his sleeve again, when Minseok slapped his arm away and dabbed his face with the handkerchief. Chanyeol winced and Minseok sighed.  
  
"You need to put your head back, or it'll get worse," he said imperiously, and forced him to sit down on a low wall behind the bike stands. When Chanyeol just gave him an odd glance, he pushed his forehead back and said, "Just wait a second. I'll get some water." He was about to leave, when Chanyeol grabbed the hem of his jacket.  
  
"Hyung, stop," Chanyeol said, as he looked up to him. "It's not that I mind you babying me, but you were right. I can't have everything , so let's just be strangers from now on."  
  
Minseok frowned. He felt weirdly reluctant to accept the idea, maybe because he hated to have someone else make his decisions.  
"What if they realize that Student Y in the picture is me?" he then asked, and Chanyeol put on a pained expression, as if it only dawned to him then how complicated the situation had become. "I mean, you can always deny it, but there are enough hints. My height, my shoes, my backpack, what if they're sure that it's me? Are you going to push the blame on me, the stranger, who obviously initiated the thing in the picture?"  
  
"No, I'm," Chanyeol began and seemed to be at a loss. "I don't know. I'll take care of it."  
  
"How?"  
  
"I don't fucking know," Chanyeol muttered and rubbed his eyes. "But honestly, what do you want me to say now? Yes, I caused the mess. Yes, the girl I broke up with because I realized too late that I wasn't interested now tries to fuck up my life. But no, I never wanted to drag you into this. So all I can do now is to stay away and make them all shut up." He stood up in irritation and swore under his breath when he wiped his nose too abrasively. "And anyway, you wanted me to make a decision, so I did. Let's end this, and I'll take care of the rest myself."  
  
And Minseok didn't know why he bothered, but it was too easy. After those weeks of Chanyeol following him around, it didn't seem fair for it to end like that. Life wasn't a story, and they already had their big climax, but what about Chanyeol's great speech? What about the story of how there would always be someone who liked him, no matter what he did?  
So he asked, "Is that what you want?", not really knowing what kind of answer he wanted to hear.  
  
Chanyeol shrugged, and finally said, "No. It's not."  
  
"So why don't you do what you want? Isn't that what you always do?"  
  
Chanyeol sighed, "This whole thing doesn't depend on what I want."  
  
"Why?" Minseok asked quietly. "Aren't you the hero? You're the mayor and there are people who support you and people who oppose you, but that's normal, because you're a politician, right?" He laughed and Chanyeol gave him an odd look. "And then you married a woman, but you realized too late that you couldn't love her, because you were already in love with the storyteller. So what, is this where the story ends? What if the storyteller has fallen into the sea as well? Are you just going to let him drown?"  
  
"Hyung," Chanyeol said and looked confused.  
  
"Honestly, Park Chanyeol, your story is shit," he said and couldn't really tell why he felt so angry all of a sudden. "First you drag me into it and now what? You push me to the side and turn yourself into the solemn hero who fights all the bad guys? Who the hell do you think you are? Bruce Lee?"  
  
"Hyung, that's not," Chanyeol began, but got interrupted when Minseok put his hand on his mouth in the spur of the moment to make him shut up  
  
"What do you want?" he asked. "What do you really want? And don't make excuses. Don't hold back just because you think that it makes you look cool. No one likes a self-sacrificing hero, not when he constantly causes problems anyway."  
  
Chanyeol knit his brow, and sighed when he finally reluctantly lifted his hand to pull off Minseok's. "You," he meekly said. "I want you."  
  
And Minseok didn't know if it was the right thing. He didn't have any plans for his future and had become part of a stupid war, although he hadn't even decided on whether or not he wanted to attend a university. His family had given up on him, and most people had already begun assuming that there was no great career waiting for him.  
Maybe he was just that desperate to have someone who liked him, no matter how useless he was.  
Maybe he didn't want to give up the feeling of someone worrying about him, not because they were tied by their blood, but because they cared.  
Maybe it was that.  
Whatever it was though, as he stood behind the school that morning, it didn't feel wrong when he said, "Fine. You can have me."

A long, long time ago, there was a village near the sea that was eaten up by a big wave. It disappeared from all the maps and soon everyone forgot about it.

But the villagers didn't die. They continued their lives under the sea, because now they could do what they wanted.

The storyteller fell off his cloud and met the mayor, who had already waited for him. The mayor's ex-wife spread mean rumours about them, but the storyteller and the mayor just laughed.

Whether they lived happily every after or not though, is not yet decided.

Life isn't a story. There is no end.

**Author's Note:**

> Credit for the title goes to the poetry collection "The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea" by Mark Haddon by the way. Without it, this story wouldn't exist and I hope that one day, I'll come up with a title like that by myself.


End file.
